Arrivederci to the Wise Pilgrim

After our trek across Rome the day before, Diana and I hardly had enough energy to walk across the street.  But it was our last day in the Eternal City, and so we went to as many sites as we could.  First we went to the great mother sanctuary of the Jesuit order, the Church of the Gesù.

Within the heavy facade of the church, the interior is cavernous and heavily ornamented.

Like the Church of Sant'Ignazio, the vaulted ceiling of the Gesù is painted with an optical illusion of light pouring from heaven onto a crowd of saints, while demons and sinners plummet down into the darkness.  Diana and I stared at the ceiling for a long time, trying to tell which figures were painted, which were stucco, and which were a mixture of the two.  Some looked three dimensional until you noticed that the shadows they were casting might be paint.  It really looked like the hosts of heaven were floating up from the walls of the church and the damned souls were falling down into the nave.

Here is a view of the dome with the light shining through the windows.

Not surprisingly, St. Ignatius of  Loyola was buried in this, the mother church of the order he founded.  His tomb was originally located near the high altar, but after his canonization, the body was moved to a grand chapel in the north transept.  In full Baroque dramatic spectacle there is a mechanical device that can lower the altarpiece painting for special occasions to reveal a silver statue of St. Ignatius. 

 Here is the urn that holds the remains of St. Ignatius, carved from precious stone and resting under the altar with a perpetually burning lamp.  There are gold and brass plaques ornamenting the chapel and brilliant blue lapis lazuli stone.

And looking up past the altarpiece and the glinting blue lapis lazuli stone, you can see a painted image of St. Ignatius rising to heaven.

Across from the tomb of St. Ignatius is a chapel dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary who took Christianity to Asia.  His body rests in Goa, India, but the Gesù has his right hand.  You can see it framed in a glass oval rimmed in gold on the altar.  It is an "uncorrupted relic," meaning that the skin of his hand has not completely decayed--I thought it looked a little like blackened bacon on an arm bone!

Diana and I had to hurry from the Gesù to make our 1:15 pm reservation at the Villa  Borghese Museum.  It was a long walk uphill in the heat, and my feet were completely done in from the day before, so it was slow going!  The Borghese Villa was once the residence of the powerful and worldly cardinal, Scipione Borghese, nephew to Pope Paul V.  He was an avid art collector, and he commissioned a number of sculptures from Bernini, which are still in his villa.  We saw two portraits of the cardinal by Bernini, so lifelike that scholars have called them "speaking likenesses."  There are also a number of remarkable statues that Bernini did early on his career.  After we finished in the museum, I left to go use the Jesuit Archive one last time.  I tried to walk there, but I caved in and took the metro when I started to lose my way.

Diana and I met at the glorious Church of S. Luigi dei Francesi.  As the worldwide capital of the Catholic Church, Rome encouraged international churches that reflected the different devotional flavors of various countries.  This French church is dedicated to San Luigi, or St. Louis IX, the pious king of France and one of the country's special patron saints.  In addition to being a stunning example of Baroque ornamentation, the church also has some Caravaggio paintings in their original location.  After leaving S. Luigi, Diana and I hurried back to our hotel.  I had wanted to go to a gelateria named Giolitti, which I had visited on my last two trips to Rome, but we had had a little bit of a hard time locating it.  Finally we found it, and we each got two flavors.  I had cantaloupe and walnut.  In America you would be a fool to get a flavor like cantaloupe, don't you think?  It would almost assuredly be terrible and artificial tasting.   Not so in Italy.  All gelato flavors are fabulous there!

Diana and I were very sad to leave Rome, but we didn't really get a chance to ponder on our sorrow because getting to the airport was a frustrating mess of running, not finding the right bus, and then getting there earlier than we needed to with nothing to eat but a second-rate chocolate muffin.  How disappointing to eat an American treat for our last meal in Italy!  The border patrol line in England was unbelievable long, we missed the last train to Cambridge and had to take a night bus, and then there were frightening British youth annoying people as we tried to walk home.  We ate a big dinner of felafel at about 3:00 am at Diana's apartment, and then the next morning I had to take a plane to the Eindhoven airport in Holland.  Somehow we found ourselves again running to the station in order for me to catch my train out of Cambridge!  Why does that always happen to me?  I got back to the Netherlands on a Saturday evening, and the next day I gave a talk in Church, and I'm proud to say that I spoke entirely in Dutch!  I had laboriously written my talk out in Dutch, and then the father of the wonderful family I had been staying with fixed my errors.  I said goodbye to all my friends in Holland, and the next morning the father of the family took me to the airport to fly back home.  And so, the adventures of the Wise Pilgrim come to an end, at least for now.  He is gone to the place where good pilgrims go ... until another journey begins!